HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08): Britain's Flagship, From New Jersey Trials to the South China Sea

Built Across Six Shipyards

HMS Queen Elizabeth is the lead ship of her class and, at 65,000 tonnes and 284 metres long, the largest warship the Royal Navy has ever built, delivered at a programme cost of £6.1 billion. Constructed by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, a consortium bringing together BAE Systems, Babcock, A&P Tyne, Cammell Laird and others, she was assembled from nine massive blocks built in six different shipyards around the country before being brought together at Rosyth. Unusually for a British carrier, she carries two separate islands rather than one, splitting navigation and flying control into two structures that can, in theory, each cover for the other if one is knocked out.

Laid down on 7 July 2009, she was named and floated out at Rosyth on 4 July 2014, when her royal sponsor, Queen Elizabeth II, broke a bottle of Bowmore whisky from Islay across the bow rather than the traditional champagne, continuing a name that had last gone to sea as the First World War's Queen Elizabeth-class battleships. She commissioned on 7 December 2017 under her first sea-going captain, Commodore Jerry Kyd, previously captain of both HMS Illustrious and HMS Ark Royal, though she did not formally enter full service until 2020, a reflection of just how much work goes into bringing a ship of this scale and complexity to genuine operational readiness.

Two of the ships in that sentence are in this corpus as well. The battleship whose name she inherited was no ordinary predecessor: HMS Queen Elizabeth was the ship that made the fast battleship possible and gambled the Royal Navy's future on a gun calibre nobody had yet fired. Commodore Kyd's two previous commands have accounts of their own too: HMS Illustrious (R06) and HMS Ark Royal (R09), both of them scrapped before this ship ever put to sea, which is why there was a carrier gap to close in the first place.

The Carrier That Was Cheaper to Build Than to Cancel

There is a reason there are two of these ships rather than one, and it has nothing to do with strategy. In 2009 the Ministry of Defence signed a fifteen-year contract with BAE Systems, the point of which was as much to keep British warship building alive as to produce anything in particular. It carried penalty clauses. Nobody paid them much attention at the time.

In 2010 the incoming government's Strategic Defence and Security Review looked at the programme and concluded that Britain needed one carrier, not two, and went to cancel the second. The MOD's own accountants came back and said it could not be done: the penalties for walking away came to more than the cost of finishing the ship. David Cameron told the House of Commons, in as many words, that the country had been left in a position where cancelling the second carrier would actually cost more than building it. So both were built.

It is a marvellous line and it is not quite the whole truth. The National Audit Office went through the figures the following year and found that, once the loss of VAT exemptions and the rest of it was counted properly, cancelling one carrier would still have saved something like two hundred million pounds and cancelling both around one and a quarter billion. What was true was that walking away meant paying close to a billion up front before any of those savings arrived, which is a different problem and, for a government in 2010, an insurmountable one.

So the honest version is that the Royal Navy has two sixty-five-thousand-tonne aircraft carriers because a contract written to protect shipyards made the short-term cost of stopping unbearable, and a decision that had been taken was found to be unaffordable to unmake. Liam Fox cut the first steel for HMS Prince of Wales (R09) on 26 May 2011, seven months after the review that had decided she was not needed. Fifteen years on, with one of them permanently at sea and the other working up, it is difficult to find anybody who thinks the accountants did the country a disservice.

Proving the Jets, One First at a Time

The months of contractor's trials and work-up that followed saw her repeatedly threading the narrow harbour mouth past Portsmouth's historic Round Tower, becoming a familiar and thoroughly photogenic sight in the city long before her first jet ever landed.

Much of Queen Elizabeth's early career was devoted to methodically proving that Britain's new F-35B Lightning stealth jets could actually operate from her deck.

The first F-35B take-off from her distinctive ski-jump ramp came on 25 September 2018 off the coast of New Jersey, followed by the first shipborne rolling vertical landing that October, a landing technique that lets the short take-off jet come down with more fuel and weapons aboard than a standard vertical landing allows.

The first landing by a British-flown F-35B followed in October 2019, and by December that year she had hosted the first British F-35B launch conducted in UK waters, milestones that collectively proved Britain's new carrier strike capability actually worked, rather than simply existing on paper.

Flagship, and a Deployment That Circled the Globe

Queen Elizabeth declared Initial Operating Capability on 4 January 2021 and formally took on the role of Fleet Flagship later that month.

Her defining moment came just months later, when she departed home waters in May 2021 leading Carrier Strike Group 21, sailing with the Type 45 destroyers HMS Defender and HMS Diamond, the Type 23 frigates HMS Kent and HMS Richmond, an Astute-class submarine, the American destroyer USS The Sullivans, the Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen, and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary support ships Tidespring and Fort Victoria. The seven-month, 49,000-nautical-mile deployment took her through NATO exercises in the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, the Suez Canal on 7 July, joint exercises with the Indian Navy, freedom of navigation operations in the contested South China Sea, and exercises with Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force.

Several of the escorts on that deployment have their own accounts here. HMS Defender (D36) detached from the group in the Black Sea and produced the single most reported incident of the whole seven months; HMS Kent (F78) and HMS Richmond (F239) both went on east, Richmond through the Taiwan Strait on the way home, which the Chinese took about as well as might be expected.

Along the way, on 18 June 2021, her embarked F-35Bs began combat operations against Islamic State targets under Operation Inherent Resolve, giving the deployment a genuine combat dimension alongside its diplomatic and training value. It was, by any measure, one of the most ambitious deployments any Royal Navy ship has undertaken in decades. She sailed back into Portsmouth Harbour that December to a large homecoming welcome, tugs shepherding her past the Spinnaker Tower she had left behind seven months and 49,000 nautical miles earlier.

Setbacks Along the Way

No deployment of that scale comes without difficulty. A COVID-19 outbreak aboard in July 2021 required vaccination and mitigation measures mid-voyage, and that November an F-35B from 617 Squadron crashed into the Mediterranean during operations, though the pilot ejected safely.

Earlier technical issues, including propeller shaft debris found during sea trials and a subsequently identified propeller shaft leak, had already given the carrier programme some difficult headlines before she ever deployed operationally, echoing the kind of teething troubles any first-of-class warship of this scale tends to encounter.

The most serious propeller shaft trouble came later, in February 2024, when a routine pre-sailing check found that a cover on the starboard shaft had shifted, letting in seawater and causing corrosion serious enough that Queen Elizabeth had to withdraw from NATO's Exercise Steadfast Defender at only days' notice, with sister ship HMS Prince of Wales stepping in to take her place off Norway's Arctic coast instead. She made her way north to Rosyth on a single shaft, and what began as a short repair turned into a much longer job: engineers ultimately replaced both propeller shafts entirely, the same fix already carried out on Prince of Wales, keeping her tied up in dock, on and off, for the best part of two years once further scheduled maintenance was folded into the same period.

A Sobering Loss

Not every setback has been mechanical. On 4 September 2024, a Commando Helicopter Force Merlin Mk.4, drawn from 845 or 846 Naval Air Squadron out of RNAS Yeovilton, ditched into the English Channel off Dorset during a night flying exercise associated with the carrier group, an accident that cost one crew member their life and left two others hospitalised.

It stands as a sober reminder that even routine training around a carrier group carries real risk for the people who fly and serve aboard it.

Still Leading From the Front

HMS Queen Elizabeth remains in active service today, homeported at Portsmouth, with the role of flagship currently held by her sister, HMS Prince of Wales. She deployed to northern European waters in 2023 under Operation Firedrake with F-35Bs from 617 Squadron, and after the propeller shaft saga kept her largely tied up through 2024 and 2025, she returned home from a further dry-docking at Rosyth to a "welcome home" celebration on 8 May 2026, a passage that gave more than a quarter of her roughly 700-strong ship's company their first ever time at sea. With sister ship HMS Prince of Wales leading the Royal Navy's 2025 Indo-Pacific deployment, Operation Highmast, in her stead, Queen Elizabeth is now working back up through sea trials and training ahead of her own next spell at the front of the fleet.

From proving carrier aviation off the American coast to leading a truly global deployment that touched the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific, she has spent her career living up to the scale of ambition her construction represented.

Back at Sea as NATO's Command Ship

On the evening of 5 September 2026, HMS Queen Elizabeth sailed from Portsmouth with more than 800 sailors aboard for a three-month deployment around the UK and northern Europe, her first operational deployment since the long maintenance and repair period that began in late 2024. She went in a new role, having taken over in July as command ship for NATO's Allied Response Force (Maritime), the first time a Queen Elizabeth-class carrier has held it. The programme includes advanced training under Flag Officer Sea Training across the full range of naval warfare, and rehearsals of how an allied naval force would work together in a crisis, all of it building towards her taking over from HMS Prince of Wales as the UK's flagship and high-readiness strike carrier in late 2027.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.